Western Resistance

« UK: Minister Warns Of "Muslim Inbreeding" | | Denmark: Five Islamists Arrested For Cartoonist Murder Plot »

February 11, 2008

US: Six Charged Over 9/11 Islamist Attacks

News from Channel 4, VOA, AFP, Newsday, Sydney Morning Herald, Telegraph, Guardian, Associated Press, Reuters, Times, Dailly Mail, BBC and Defense Link.

Six men who are currently detained in Guantanamo are to be charged in connection with the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks which killed almost 3,000 people in 2001. The announcement was made at a Pentagon press conference by Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann of USAF, who acts asLegal Adviser to the Convening Authority in the DoD Office of Military Commissions. In all, the charges list "169 overt acts allegedly committed by the defendants in furtherance of the September 11 events."

Brig. Gen Hartmann claimed: "These charges allege a long-term, highly sophisticated, organized plan by al-Qaida to attack the United States of America." He said: "The accused will have his opportunity to have his day in court. It's our obligation to move the process forward, to give these people their rights.... There will be no secret trials. We are gong to give them rights that are virtually identical to our military members." He warned: "The defendants will face the possibility of being sentenced to death."

Each of the six individuals will be charged with 2,973 counts of murder. The Pentagon's prosecutors are seeking to see the men face the death penalty. Much of the information that is used to indict these men was gleaned from methods of interrogation, including in some instances "waterboarding" that may be ruled inadmissable. Two of the suspects have been through "enhanced interrogation" which includes sleep deprivation and prolonged questioning.

The full charges against the six men can be found as a 90-page downloadable pdf document on Defense Link.

The men who are facing charges are: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Mohammed al-Qahtani.

All six are charged with: conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, terrorism and providing material support for terrorism.

Ramzi Binalshibh, Walid Bin Attash, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are charged with hijacking or hazarding a vessel.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Kuwait in 1965. He is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who committed the earlier attack upon the World Trade center on February 26, 1993. This killed six people and injured hundreds. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to plotting the 9/11 attacks. Under interrogation he gave information on others. He was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003. He claims to have joined the Muslim Brotherhood when aged 16. He went to the Philippines and was implicated in nephew Ramzi Yousef's "Operation Bojinka" plot, which aimed to blow up US-bound planes across the Pacific using liquid explosives assembled on these aircraft. By the end of 2001, he was external operations chief for al-Qaeda. He cultivated links between Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). Members of JI were to be the bombers to be used in the Operation Bojinka plot.

Walid Bin Attash, also called Tawfiq bin Attash and Khallad, is said by the Pentagon to have selected and trained some of the 9/11 hijackers. He also is said to have confessed at a closed military tribunal to masterminding the attack on the USS Cole in Aden, southern Yemen, on October 12, 2000 as it was undergoing a refueling. This attack which involved an explosives-filled boat cost the lives of 17 US sailors. Attash additionally, states the Pentagon, assisted in the planning of the US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam Tanzania and Nairobi Kenya on Friday August 7 1998, which together killed 213 people. Attash was captured in Pakistan in 2003. He is also suspected of recruiting an individual who led a cell that carried out bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003. That attack killed 40 people. He apparently was to be a hijacker, but his brief arrest and detention earlier in 2001 in Yemen prevented him from achieving this goal. He is also said to have been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard. He is suspected of involvement in a plot against London's Heathrow Airport.

Evidence to an earlier Guantanamo tribunal concerning Walid bin Attash can be found as a pdf document (3.5 mb).

Ramzi Binalshibh (Bin al-Shib) was born in 1972 in Yemen. He is said to have shared an apartment with 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta in Hamburg. He had applied for asylum in Germany in the late 1990s while a student in the country. He was refused a US entry visa four times in 2000. It was suspected that once inside America he would never leave. He wanted to attend a flying school in the US. Failing to enter the US, he concentrated on funding and coordination of the 9/11 attacks, it is alleged. He left Germany a week before the 9/11 attacks, and went to Afghanistan and from there to Pakistan, where he worked with Khalid Mohammed. Binalshibh was arrested in September 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan.

Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, is a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, He was born in Balochistan, Pakistan, but was raised in Kuwait. When the Taliban collapsed, he helped Al Qaeda members to find safe houses in Pakistan. He was a key lieutenant to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it is alleged. US officials have claimed that he delivered money to the 9/11 hijackers. He also helped Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to communicate with Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" who on December 22, 2001 tried to ignite a bomb in his shoe on an American Airlines Flight 63 bound from Paris to Miami. Aziz Ali is said to have plotted attacks on Heathrow Airport and also to have planned bombings against Western targets in Karachi, southern Pakistan. He was apparently within days of bringing the Karachi plot to its conclusion when he was arrested, the US has claimed. He is said by the Pentagon to have sent $120,000 to the 9/11 hijackers, and helped nine of them to travel from Pakistan to the United States.

Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi was one of two financial backers employed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He apparently shared a United Arab emirates bank account with one of the 9/11 hijackers. Hawsawi gave testimony during the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, claiming to have seen the latter at an Al Qaeda guest house in early 2001. Hawsawi was arrested in Pakistan in 2003.

Mohammed al-Qahtani was barred entry to the US on August 4, 2001. He had tried to enter at Orlando International Airport. He had come from the Middle East carrying $2,800 and a one-way ticket. He also had an itinerary which mentioned al-Hawsawi. Qahtani was thought to have been a proposed 9/11 hijacker. It is thought he would have been on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. He was captured at Tora-Bora in Afghanistan and was moved to Guantanamo in February 2002.

The death penalty can only be enforced if all of a After a Supreme Court intervention, the defendants will all have a right of appeal. The men will have court-appointed military lawyers to defend the, but will only have civilian lawyers if they can afford these themselves. Brig. Gen. Hartmann has stressed that the men will have the right to cross-examine witnesses and to study evidence.

There will be many hurdles to overcome before the men stand trial, in particular the issue of "admissable evidence".

Brig. Gen. Hartmann said: "We are a nation of law and not of men, and the question of what evidence will be admitted,... will be decided in the courts in front of a judge after it's fought out between the defense and the prosecution in these cases. That's the rule of law; that's the procedure the Congress has provided to us, and that's what we will use to finally answer these questions."

"We are going to give them rights. We are going to give them rights that are virtually identical to the rights we provide to our military members, our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who fight in the battlefield, and I think we'll all agree are national treasures."

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at February 11, 2008 8:55 PM

Comments

Post a comment